Bernie Sanders was the big winner in Iowa, as he had, as he called it, a “virtual tie” with Hillary Clinton, and the Vermont senator has set himself a fine launch into the neighboring state of New Hampshire, where he should trounce Mrs. Clinton next week. The Republican night was toe-curlingly excruciating. ...Read More...

The presidential political tides are shifting in all directions. The recent vigorous attacks on Donald Trump in National Review and The Weekly Standard by an imposing phalanx of commentators, including some eminent conservative intellectuals, coupled to the deterioration of the Clinton campaign and ...Read More...

The anti-John A. Macdonald demonstration by a group of protesting native people in Kingston on Jan. 11, the 201st birthday of the country’s chief founder, was a shocking incident that has been under-publicized. At the same time as an effigy of Macdonald was hanged, burned, and stabbed, there was a respectful ...Read More...

China’s greatest senior level government purges and its greatest roll-back of freedom of expression since the lunacy of the Maoist Cultural Revolution almost 50 years ago have been occurring for several years and have been relatively passively noticed in the world. Where in earlier times purges were ...Read More...

The West’s leaders have failed conspicuously, yet again, over world oil prices, as they have failed as a group to grapple with almost any serious problem for some years. The latest fiasco is the attempt by the leaders of the democratic world to blame their economic ills on the decline of the world oil ...Read More...

The North Koreans, perhaps the loopiest regime in the world that actually governs a defined and recognized country, now claims to have a hydrogen bomb. In reality, it may not yet, but eventually it will. We have chiefly the Chinese to thank for this, as North Korea could not in practice accomplish anything ...Read More...

The country, bloody, bowed, is yet lumbering determinedly forward, toward the last year of the Obama economic, social, and geopolitical miracle. All polls, from right to left, show the administration’s disapproval rating 10 to 20 points ahead of its approval rating; all show 65 to 80 percent of the ...Read More...

The principal news about Donald Trump’s candidacy for the U.S. Republican presidential nomination is not the sometimes controversial things that he says, but the increasingly hysterical responses to him from the traditionally respectable political quarters that he discomforts. In this shrill political ...Read More...

It is time to look more seriously at the Donald Trump presidential candidacy. He continues to lead the polls among Republicans; his closest rivals seem now to be Senators Mario Rubio and Ted Cruz, easing ahead of Dr. Ben Carson. There does not seem to have been much effort to see the Trump candidacy ...Read More...

My views of the Paris conference on the environment were published here last week and need not be revisited. But I think the phenomenon of climate change rigidity is so unusual and widespread, it is worthy of more analysis. We start from the fact that absolutely everyone is an environmentalist in the ...Read More...

There is something deeply disturbing about the Obama administration’s handling of the Islamic-terrorism issue, from Iraq and Syria to San Bernardino; and with its feckless preoccupation with climate-change questions. The country is about to enter the last year of Obama’s administration, which opened ...Read More...

In general, we want to encourage politicians to do after they win elections what they promised they would do before the election, and from that perspective it is hard to blame Justin Trudeau for continuing to promise to withdraw Canada’s CF-18’s from the air war against the Islamic State (ISIS). I don’t ...Read More...

There are a few comparatively bright spots in the otherwise unspeakable horror of the terrorist outrages in Paris. As I wrote here after the Charlie Hebdo and Jewish Market murders in Paris in January of this year, the French know better than any other democracy how to deal with monstrous assaults on ...Read More...

The new government has already declared that it will, as promised in the late election campaign, withdraw Canada’s token participation in the U.S.-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, although it is continuing to train some local forces supported by the West. It should emphasize ...Read More...

The incoming federal government has the strongest mandate since the election of Brian Mulroney 31 years ago; as Jean Chrétien won elections that were contested by five parties that would have been cliff-hangers if the opposition had been as consolidated as it became after he was ousted by his own party; ...Read More...

In the dramatic fall of the Harper government and the meteoric doubling of the Liberal percentage of the popular vote, and quintupling of that party’s number of MPs, it is easy to lose sight of what the outgoing regime accomplished and even of what the most important shifts of electoral currents have ...Read More...

The peculiarity of the American political scene now is a profound revulsion against the more than 20 years of misgovernment the country has suffered, from both parties and in all three branches. For the first time in living memory, and probably in the history of the country, the United States has endured ...Read More...

Since the end of the Cold War, the American public and even the U.S. government appear to have lost almost all interest in Latin America, apart from immigration questions. While the Cold War was active, the Soviet Union had the will and the capability to distract the United States severely by promoting ...Read More...

The arguments for voting for Conservative Leader Stephen Harper are numerous and persuasive. He has been a competent and diligent prime minister who has avoided fiscal imprudence, brought us well through the 2008 financial crisis and has gone to great and imaginative lengths to keep taxes down and shrink ...Read More...

It is astonishing that, with barely a week left before the federal election, pollsters seem to agree the principal issue between the main parties is whether the face-covering niqab can be worn by a handful of women when they take their oath as new citizens of Canada, having privately satisfied authorities ...Read More...

In the week in which the Russians escalated their attacks on the Syrian factions being assisted by the United States and what is left of the Western Alliance, and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas renounced the long-dead letter of the Oslo Agreement (for which his predecessor Yasser Arafat and the Israeli ...Read More...

With just over two weeks before the federal election, several points appear to be emerging.
The New Democrats have been given their star turn as a potential government, but have not made it. Their leader, Thomas Mulcair, has avoided the pink scare — deservedly, as he is not an extremist — but New ...Read More...

It is with inexpressible pleasure that I reply to the attack on me this week by Dr. Michael Mann, the discredited harpy of the now almost defunct global warming movement.
Readers may recall that last week, Mann made a cameo appearance in my column about the coalition industriously cobbled together ...Read More...

The Leap Manifesto unveiled by Naomi Klein and a coalition of somewhat kindred spirits this week in Toronto illustrates the phenomenon of regrouping in which the shattered Old Left, heavily buffeted eco-zealots, imperishable agitators for the native people, and the detritus of organized labour, together ...Read More...

Republicans find themselves at the confluence of two powerful political streams, a fortuitous occurrence complicated by the fact that the streams are colliding, as if rolling inexorably toward each other from two mighty sources diametrically opposite.
The Republicans have a lock on that vast mass ...Read More...